


I drown in your memory

by EponineTheStrange (gallifreyandglowclouds)



Category: Doctor Who RPF
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-07
Updated: 2013-06-07
Packaged: 2017-12-14 04:52:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,054
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/832962
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gallifreyandglowclouds/pseuds/EponineTheStrange





	I drown in your memory

Karen doesn’t think too much of the first one that arrives in the mail. It’s probably some weird fanmail thing. It’s when she unfolds it that things get kind of weird. 

_Inverness to Los Angeles, 8150 kilometers_

Paper cranes have no special significance to Karen, other than the fact that once when she was younger she read a book about a girl who tried to fold a bunch of them in the hopes of curing leukaemia. 

It perturbs her slightly, but then she just re-folds it and places it on her coffee table. 

* * *

The next one is from Cardiff, and then there’s one from London that come in the mail. 8 608 kilometres and 8 705 kilometres respectively. Karen contacts her family, and Arthur, her agent, and Steven to try and figure out who exactly is sending her those damn paper planes. 

They all deny it. She tries Matt next. 

kgillan: MATT  
kgillan: MAAAATTTT

smithereens: kazza have you lost all your knowledge of timezones  
smithereens: it’s like three in the morning 

kgillan: THIS IS IMPORTANT  
kgillan: also it’s not three in the morning in LA   
kgillan: someone is sending me paper cranes from places with the distance to LA from that place on them and i thought it might be you

smithereens: nah, i’m not that creative  
smithereens: i’m going to bed now 

Except, he totally is that creative, and it’s something he would do. 

* * *

The cranes stop for a few weeks, and then they start again, but they’ve now crossed the pond. One arrives from New York, then Hartford, Boston, Jersey City, Newark, Chicago, and then finally, she gets two from Detroit. 

kgillan: MATT THE PAPER CRANES ARE COMING FROM DETROIT NOW 

smithereens: i’ll get the michigan state police on it right away. 

kgillan: how’s filming  
kgillan: please snog ryan gosling so that I can live vicariously through you 

smithereens: maybe i already have  
smithereens: ;)

kgillan: fuck you

* * *

They start to move west after that, and more start to appear - sometimes there are several in the packages that don’t stop coming to her door. Indianapolis. Kansas City. Colorado Springs. Denver. Salt Lake City. Provo, and all matter of extremely small US towns. All with a distance from there to Los Angeles. 

She’s flummoxed. Absolutely flummoxed, but flattered, because someone is spending the money on postage and folding a shit ton of paper cranes simply for the purpose of sending them to her. She assumes that it’s someone close to her - how could it not be? They aren’t being received through her agency, so the sender in question must know her address.

She starts to grill people more and more. Arthur swears he’s not Skyping with her again until she stops getting those damn cranes, or at the very least stops accusing him of sending them. 

“It’s not an accusation, Arthur,” she says. “I’m honestly just curious.” 

* * *

The next crane she receives has been sent from California. Sacramento, to be specific. They keep coming, moving roughly south - Concord, San Francisco, Oakland, Fremont, San Luis Obispo. She has a field day tracking them all on Google Maps, and as fun as it is, she wonders if she should be worried that’s she’s got some stalker crossing the continental US to kidnap her. 

They begin approaching LA - Santa Clarita, North Valley, Cerritos - she didn’t know LA had that many suburbs. The distance shrinks incrementally, but they’re not moving towards her - they start hovering around the outer limits of Los Angeles, as if they’re scared to actually enter the city. 

Her coffee table is getting full, and she thinks that maybe it’s time to recycle them, but she feels some sort of attachment to them as she runs her hands along their points. Some are better folded than others, but the type face is the same on all. She supposes that if her secret admirer (crane-er?) had handwritten them, it would have been too easy for her to guess. 

* * *

One morning, someone knocks on the door of her flat, and to her great surprise, it’s Matt. 

And he’s holding a goddamn paper crane. 

“Where’d you get that?” she asks. 

He says nothing, but holds out the paper crane to her. 

“You’ve been sending them, haven’t you?” Karen says, hands on her hips. 

“Just open it, Kaz.” 

So there’s one mystery solved, but for some inexplicable reason, her hands are shaking as she unwraps it. It reads: 

_Distance from you to me right now: zero. I hope this doesn’t change ever, Kaz. I love you. - M_

He, in this moment, has completely and totally stolen her ability to speak, and she can just visualise it, him agonising over what to write in some crappy hotel where he’d set up camp, and then shakily writing it out and folding it, and then tossing and turning because he can’t sleep for the life of him. He looks tired, almost ragged, like someone who had been spending too much time in his car. 

Right, because he would have had to road-trip across the US to send all of those things, and even though there was probably an easier way to do it (though she couldn’t imagine it right now), because Matt never half-assed anything. 

She still can’t make words happen, so she just grabs him by the collar of his shirt, and simultaneously kisses him and yanks him inside her flat. She feels him stumble and almost trip, but once he’s inside he’s kissing her back, and finally closing the gap between them for the first time in a while.

* * *

Her brain starts working again much, much later when she’s lying beside him, head on his chest, and he’s tracing gentle patterns in the skin on her back with his fingers. 

“Why?” she asks him. 

“Because I was scared, and I didn’t know how to actually say what I wanted to say to you,” he replies, somewhat groggily as if she’d woken him up. “So I tried to work it up by making my way closer and closer to you.” 

“Well, you’re here now.” 

“Yeah.” He kissed her gently on the forehead. “Love you, Kaz.” 

“I love you too, Matt.” 

The paper cranes would eventually be strung together and hung in Karen’s flat. They would follow Matt and Karen wherever they moved, as a reminder to never be far apart again. 


End file.
